Denying denial.

        When people start trying to lose weight they have a slash and burn approach to their eating. Chucking out every food they love, with a vow to never eat it again. Changing to an ultra healthy, extremely limited collection of foods will yield results, but it's just not practice for living a normal life. I'm not saying "don't eat healthy", but I am saying that you should eat realistically.

     Allow yourself an escape route. By allotting roughly 200kcal of your daily caloric limit for none perfectly healthy foods should give you just enough freedom to stop you from breaking down, bingeing, and giving up.  A flexible approach to eating is a major ingredient in long term weight lose. There will be days when you can't work out, or eat more than your BRM (basal metabolic rate), but that doesn't mean that you have to stop losing weight or gain weight.

    A great example of this is how I've been living lately. I'm in a friends wedding party, that means I haven't been the one controlling the food I have access to. I try and make the better food choices and keep within my BMR, but with the travel to and from the events, plus the time at the events themselves I just don't have time to workout. There are a couple different ways I can approach these situations.

1) I can bank my all or a portion of my 200kcal daily treat reserve. This way when everything is added up at the end of the week I will have had the same amount of calories as the week before. This approach can also be done retroactively. If you unexpectedly go out to dinner, someone buys you a treat, or you just really want one blow out calorie bomb meal you can just cut back your calorie intake by 50-100kcal till things even out.

2) Add extra workouts. This will be easier for people who are counting both calories in and calories out (look to Breaking it down for my parents for more info). Like the calorie banking this can be done before  or after the event, or a combination. By adding about 15 minutes to the cardio portion of your workout can burn about 100kcal. This wont replace a missed workout but it will help soften the blow.

   I find a combination of the two approaches works best for me. Most importantly because I knew I had options I never worried over what food would be at an event, or if I'd be home in time to workout. I just kept going, as I have been and continue to see results.

Tara